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Military Personnel Retention

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The retention of qualified military personnel—enlisted forces as well as officers—is essential to preserving morale and unit readiness and to avoiding the costs associated with training replacement personnel in essential skills. By examining issues from PERSTEMPO and the effects of multiple deployments to family readiness and child care, RAND research supports military leaders' efforts to monitor and successfully maintain an optimal force structure.

The commercial airline industry will continue hiring more pilots to replace its aging workforce, causing more U.S. Air Force aviators to leave the service. Pilot pay is increasing in the commercial sector while Air Force aviator and retention pay are now discretionary programs under DoD guidelines.

Nearly 60 percent of U.S. military service members surveyed were unwilling to voluntarily extend their tours, believing that doing so may adversely impact quality of life, morale, or job performance. Others reported interest in longer tours if financial incentives were offered.

Assesses the cost-effectiveness for the U.S. Department of Defense of using incentives for voluntary separations, together with or instead of imposing involuntary separations, to reduce the size of its civilian workforce.

This report combines quantitative and qualitative methods to understand service member decisions upon exiting the Regular Army, particularly the decisions of whether, when, and how to affiliate with the Reserve Component.

Using insights from interviews, legislation, and policy, this report develops a decision framework that will help the U.S. Air Force's Director of Acquisition Career Management improve management of the Defense Acquisition Workforce Development Fund.

To help retain America's most experienced service members, Congress extended the military's basic pay tables to 40 years in 2007. Would retention be equally achieved by reverting to a 30-year pay table?

The commercial airline industry will continue hiring more pilots to replace its aging workforce, causing more U.S. Air Force aviators to leave the service. Pilot pay is increasing in the commercial sector while Air Force aviator and retention pay are now discretionary programs under DoD guidelines.

Nearly 60 percent of U.S. military service members surveyed were unwilling to voluntarily extend their tours because they believed doing so may adversely impact quality of life, morale, and possibly job performance. Others reported interest in longer tours under some circumstances, including if financial incentives were offered.

RAND researchers addressed topics such as whether members of U.S. special forces are ready to integrate women into their ranks and what lessons may be learned from other militaries that already have integrated women into combat positions.

The gender integration experiences of foreign militaries, as well as U.S. civilian police and fire departments, can provide valuable lessons for the U.S. Marine Corps as it considers making more opportunities available to women.

The gender integration experiences of foreign militaries — as well as U.S. civilian police and fire departments — can provide valuable lessons for the U.S. Marine Corps as it considers making more opportunities available to women.

The Marine Corps Combat Development Command asked RAND to study the integration of women into infantry combat roles. Researchers reviewed the literature, conducted interviews, estimated costs, and developed an approach for monitoring integration.

Today's U.S. military personnel system is fundamentally the same one put into place after World War II, with minor changes for officers. Reform efforts should include changes in how personnel are assigned and lengthening military careers.

A new effort to review the military's personnel system will focus initially on policies to assign, evaluate, and promote service members. To truly address systematic challenges, however, the scope will need to widen to include how the various military services might size, structure, and support key missions.

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Researcher Spotlight

Senior Project Associate

Leslie Adrienne Payne is a Senior Project Associate with a background in counterinsurgency social science and military analysis. Much of her RAND research has focused on security cooperation, counterinsurgency, US military doctrine, Air Force acquisitions and cost analysis, and diversity related…

Lisa Harrington is a senior operations researcher at the RAND Corporation and serves as associate director of the Forces and Resources Policy Center of the RAND National Security Research Division. She has focused on research problems ranging from examining Air Force (AF) science, technology,…

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